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I work in a big IT company and often times internal tools are not very accessible. Sometimes when I talk to their respective maintainers, they are willing to he
by mltony 7y ago
I work in a big IT company and often times internal tools are not very accessible. Sometimes when I talk to their respective maintainers, they are willing to help me, but they don't know what is accessibility and what is screenreader. Is there a good document on how to make web sites accessible that I can show them?
- kls 7y agoThe W3C preliminary check is a great document to get you to at least usable: https://www.w3.org/WAI/test-evaluate/preliminary/ https://www.w3.org/WAI/test-evaluate/preliminary/
- carlmr 7y agoAre CLI tools inherently accessible?
- mlang23 7y agoI guess 99.9% are. However, it is pretty hard to order a pizza or buy your weekly load of groceries with a CLI tool :-) If you want to interact with the rest of the world, you will likely need to use the web...
- downtide 7y agoI often use w3m.
- jdnenej 7y agoHave you tried Emacs?
- comex 7y ago> However, it is pretty hard to order a pizza [..] with a CLI tool :-) You’d be surprised. ;) Here’s a classic from 2004: https://www.slashdot.org/story/45782 https://www.slashdot.org/story/45782 (That specific tool probably no longer works, but Domino’s still has an API for ordering pizza… although apparently the new one isn’t officially supported.)
- dan-robertson 7y agoI’d guess not necessarily. Writing a command for a cli tool is probably reasonably accessible to blind people. But if I think of a typical workflow with unix tools (less, grep, awk, sed, sort, cut, etc), I feel like it involves a lot of glancing at the shape of a big page of results and deciding what to do. I wonder if this is harder/impossible for blind people? Maybe one just gets better at a different workflow involving eg lots of head, tail, grep -o, and less less. I also would guess that tab-completion isn’t super accessible but maybe I’m completely wrong.
- pbhjpbhj 7y agoGoogle have a good course on web accessibility which includes doing a little basic coding, looking at ARIA specs and such. I'll dig out the link when I'm back later.
- mch82 7y agoConsider installing a screenreader and the Lynx web browser so you can demonstrate what it’s like to access internal apps/websites with those tools. It might help to record your experience so people can watch the demo at their convenience. Lynx... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_%28web_browser%29?wprov=sfti1 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_%28web_browser%29?wprov...
- akavi 7y agoWhat does lynx have to do with anything? No blind person I know browses the internet without JS, and every major screen reader supports it.
- mwcampbell 7y agoYou're absolutely right. Aside from a few stubborn hold-outs, the blind people I know stopped browsing with Lynx, or Links or w3m, in the early 2000s at the latest.
- VBprogrammer 7y agoI have no experience at all with screen readers. Is there a modern FOSS screen reader that would help give an idea of what a visually impaired user would realistically experience?
- dbjorge 7y agoThe most popular FOSS screen reader by a very, very large margin is NVDA (https://www.nvaccess.org https://www.nvaccess.org). It is Windows specific, though.
- mwcampbell 7y agoThere's also the Orca screen reader for GNOME. And I believe TalkBack for Android and ChromeVox for Chrome OS are both open source. If you don't care so much about open source, as I said elsewhere on the thread, Mac has VoiceOver built in (Command+F5 to enable), and Windows has Narrator (Control+Windows+Enter to enable on recent versions). Disclosure: I'm a dev on the Narrator team at Microsoft, but I'm posting on my own behalf here.
- lallysingh 7y agoWe had a "professionalism" class in my CS undergrad program. A day using the web with a screen reader would do wonders, I think, for awareness of the issue.
- mwcampbell 7y agoI'm extending a standing offer to come in and give a guest lecture on accessibility, focusing on blind and low-vision users, for any university or high school in the Seattle metro area, free of charge. I've done this a few times already. My presentation would have a mix of concepts, demos (both good and bad), and practical advice. My email is in my profile if anyone is interested.
- wtmt 7y agoHave you done this or could you do this as a video or audio that’s posted online and available to anyone? That’d help thousands of people. If you have any links to your lectures online, please share them. It could perhaps be a “Tell HN” post here (I’m not entirely sure if that’d violate the guidelines).